VOTER ID REQUIREMENTS LIMIT POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT

A new Brown University study finds that "requiring voters to present identification at the polls leads to lower levels of voter participation" and discourages "legal immigrants from becoming citizens, particularly for blacks and Hispanics, reducing odds of naturalization by more than 15 percent." Last year, legislatures in 27 states passed laws to increase identification requirements to register to vote or cast ballots. The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Indiana's law requiring voters to present a current state-issued photo identification card tomorrow, just over a year after a U.S. appeals court barred the state of Georgia from requiring voters to obtain government-issued photo IDs. Though supporters of voter ID laws claim that they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, as The New York Times has reported, there is "virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections." Such laws have been called "modern-day equivalents of poll taxes and literacy tests that kept Black voters from the ballot box in the Jim Crow era." The study finds that the suppressive effects of voter ID laws affect "not only minorities, but also persons with less than a high school education and less than $15,000 income."

Michael H. Drucker
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